Tag Archives: obesity

New York State Assemblyman Felix Ortiz (D-Brooklyn) is on a roll, and we’re only 11 days in to the New Year. Earlier today we reported that he wants to install mandatory breathalyzers in New Yorkers’ automobiles by 2015, and now we get wind that he’s proposing a tax on kids’ rice cakes and video entertainment.

Ortiz has noticed that kids are getting kind of fat, so he’s slapping a wee little tax—one quarter of one percent—on sales of all the foods listed as sweets or snacks in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Nutrient Database for Standard Reference, plus a tax on sale and rentals of video games and movies and game controllers. (A faint silver lining: Reading this bill taught me what DVD stands for. Digital Versatile Disk, apparently. Who knew?) That money goes to an “Childhood Obesity Prevention Program Fund.” But the tax fails to distinguish between good and bad snack, and good and bad video games. So in the name of obesity prevention, education games will get hit, as will these USDA-listed snacks …

Here’s another blooper from Ortiz’ proposed ‘anti-obesity’ tax: Kids and adults intent on purchasing Nintendo’s Wii ‘Fit’ games would be penalized with a sin tax. According to People magazine, First Lady Michelle Obama encourages her two girls to engage in Wii’s virtual physical fitness games on a regular basis.

Got some advice for Ortiz before his next attempt to legislate the behaviors and eating habits of New Yorkers both young and old? Contact his office.

Pepsi is moving out of Baltimore due to the city's burdensome soda tax.

Nanny state bureaucrats in Baltimore, Md., are responsible for adding another 75 of the struggling city’s workers to the unemployment ranks, courtesy of their war against obesity. Pepsi-Cola announced it will no longer produce soda in ‘Charm City’ as a result of the recently passed two cent per container soda tax.

“In the case of Baltimore, as you may know, there was a beverage tax that was passed here and in this case, it did not help in the decision in terms of keeping the Baltimore plant open,” said Pepsi spokesperson Mark Dollins.

Baltimore grocers also report that the soda tax has had an adverse affect on their bottom lines as shoppers are traveling outside of city limits to purchase sugar-sweetened beverages.

“I’m just shocked that [Pepsi’s] pulling out and I asked them if there was anything we could do at the city level with Baltimore Development Corporation and try to offer some kind of incentive and they said it was too far down the line,” said City Council President Jack Young.

This is what happens, Jack, when big government over-regulates and over-burdens private businesses, both large and small, with needless taxes that eliminate any economic incentives keeping them in your city versus somewhere else with fiscally responsible leaders who would be more than happy to make ample accommodations that might help shrink their unemployment rosters and boost their economies in these difficult times.

The Orlando Sentinel’s in-house anti-obesity crusader, Linda Shrieves, went to bat yesterday for a radical animal ‘rights’ group that is attempting to replace the USDA’s food pyramid with a vegan substitute that eliminates all meat and dairy products.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports that the St. Paul school district will make all public schools “sweet-free zones” by the end of the school year. Opponents of the plan say “there is little proof such policies work” and that “it’s a school’s role to teach — not force — students to eat healthy.”

The school district’s unproven and experimental anti-obesity crusade is being fueled by “a series of state and federal grants, the largest of which will end this school year.”

Agree or disagree with St. Paul Public Schools’ crusade to rid all “sweet, sticky, fat-laden [and] salty treats” from kids’ lunchboxes and cafeteria trays?

Contact Superintendent Valeria S. Silva if you think parents, not bureaucrats, should determine what’s best for their own children to consume in school cafeterias:

Michelle Malkin just released her “Big Nannies of the Year” list and Reason.tv recently held its annual red carpet ‘awards gala.’ Find out who made the cut and let us know if a notorious nanny state nincompoop has been overlooked.

Monet Parham is a proud foot soldier in big government's crusade to prohibit parents from determining what's best for their kids to eat. Send her an email: monet.parham-lee@cdph.ca.gov

While countless media outlets continue to herald a ‘mother of two children’ who jointly filed a class-action lawsuit against McDonald’s intended to force a nationwide ban on Happy Meal toys, one big fact is ominously missing from most, if not all, news stories: Monet Parham is also an overzealous food cop employed by the California Department of Public Health.

Overlawyered.com’s Walter Olsen writes in the NY Daily News that Parham is anything buy a “random (if oddly well-informed) California mom,” as reporters interviewing her insist. He and fellow blogger Ira Stoll reveal that Parham “works on a federally funded program that campaigns to exhort people to eat their vegetables and that sort of thing.”

Stoll notes that in wake of her participation in the Center for Science in the Public Interest’s lawsuit against McDonald’s, Parham’s name “has been scrubbed from the website of Champions for Change, the Network for a Healthy California.” Despite attempts to preserve her identity as just ‘some ordinary mom,’ Parham’s participation in so-called ‘health eating’ conferences is still in plain sight (be quick before that disappears, too).

“She presents herself as an ordinary mother. She is not,” Olsen says. “She is an advocate, and an employee of a California agency tasked with advocating the eating of vegetables. To the extent that Monet Parham-Lee has EVER taken her daughter to a McDonald’s, she should have known better.”

Here’s a look at how the major media outlets are describing Parham. Some reporters have clearly and cleverly been duped by Parham while other ‘journalists’ are complicit in portraying her as an innocent mom whose two young children have been victimized by a greedy corporate food giant and its mind-controlling two-cent trinkets:

"Congratulations on one of our final acts of sabotaging democracy and freedom together!"

Here’s something to chew on that you’ll be hard-pressed to find in the State-Run Media’s news buffet: The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released “precise” new data last week that “thoroughly refute the misleading claims of alarmists advocating for vastly expanding federal regulation of the food supply.”

The House recently passed its version of the Food Safety bill using exaggerated CDC numbers from 1999 to create the aura of a crisis in Americans’ minds, reports the Heritage Foundation. On Sunday evening, the Senate pushed ahead in turning myths in to reality by agreeing to pass the ‘junk science’ legislation with a voice vote, despite the CDC’s new report released last Wednesday showing significant drops in food-borne illnesses and related deaths.

Just another instance of big government bureaucrats neglecting to take the time to read anything pertinent to the issue at hand before ‘passing the bill‘ and screwing American citizens with needless reforms for the sake of “change.”